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Reporters Without Borders said in it’s 2005 special report titled “Xinhua: the world’s biggest propaganda agency”, that “Xinhua remains the voice of the sole party”, “particularly during the SARS epidemic, Xinhua has for last few months been putting out news reports embarrassing to the government, but they are designed to fool the international community, since they are not published in Chinese.”

Archive for the ‘Religious’ Category

BEIJING — In another sign of the authorities’ efforts to contain one of China’s fastest-growing religions, a government demolition campaign against public symbols of the Christian faith has toppled crosses at two more churches in the coastal province of Zhejiang, according to residents there. Read the rest of this entry »

Chinese authorities in Tibet have detained three villagers for refusing to fly the Chinese national flag from their homes, as local officials continue to press a campaign forcing displays of loyalty to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Read the rest of this entry »

Over 1,900 Chinese people in northeastern China have signed a petition calling for the release of two elderly women who were jailed for several years for practicing Falun Gong, a traditional spiritual practice that has been persecuted for over 13 years.

The two women, Zhang Mingfeng and Zhang Guizhi, who are both believed to be in their 60s, were arrested after an undercover policeman asked them for a DVD containing information about Shen Yun Performing Arts, a dance and musical performance that tours the world, presenting traditional Chinese culture independent of the regime, according to its website. Read the rest of this entry »

The actor Richard Gere has labelled China the world’s “largest hypocrisy” and condemned the communist nation’s continuing occupation of Tibet during a television interview at a religious event in India.

Gere, a Buddhist who is a devotee of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, spoke out during an extensive primetime interview on English-language news channel NDTV 24×7 last night. The actor, who is in India for the 10-day annual Kalachakra Puja Buddhist celebration, said China had failed to gauge the level of cultural idiosyncrasy in Tibet.

“China is a very difficult place to live if you are a free thinker, if you are an artist, if you are a religious person, but especially in Tibet,” said Gere. “I think they (China) have so wrongly gauged the Tibetan people, thinking they could subvert the deep, deep, deep religious beliefs and make them true communists. It’s never going to happen. Their whole lives have revolved around Buddhism, around their teachers, around their gurus … the high ideals of Buddhism. They are not going to change that in a hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years. That will never go away.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Dalai Lama has blamed the Chinese government’s policy of “cultural genocide” in his native Tibet for a wave of self-immolations that has struck restive Tibetan areas of western China this year.

At least 11 Tibetans, all of them Buddhist nuns, monks or former monks, have set themselves on fire since March to protest against Chinese rule and religious repression, according to human rights and exile groups.

The Chinese government has blamed the Dalai Lama for encouraging the self-immolations and says he and his “clique” are engaged in “disguised terrorism” and “pursuing separatism by harming people”.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said Beijing’s hardline policy towards any hint of dissent among Tibetans was the real cause of the demonstrations. Read the rest of this entry »

(VOA News)- By mobile phone, Internet and shortwave radio, Tibetan exiles maintain a constant watch on their friends, contacts and relatives living in Tibet under Chinese control. China’s increasingly sophisticated ability to conduct cyber-warfare is making the task more challenging, and pushing Tibetan exiles to develop training programs for keeping themselves secure online.

Kanyak Tsering is an exiled Tibetan monk. He belongs to a Dharamsala, India-based branch of the Kirti monastery, a Buddhist compound across the Chinese border that has been under a lockdown by security forces for months. Read the rest of this entry »

BEIJING (BP)–Despite restrictions due to the Chinese Communist Party’s 90th anniversary, members of Shouwang Church in Beijing continued to meet outdoors July 3, leading to at least 19 arrests.

Church members defied the Chinese government for the 13th consecutive week with the outdoor service. The illegal church, which was evicted from its leased meeting space in April, reported in a translated statement on ChinaAid.org that police were waiting outside the church’s designated worship site, an open-air plaza in northwest Beijing, and “only a few dozen people” were able to meet because, “many believers were under stricter detainment at home. Some individuals were taken to be detained in hotels nearby.” Read the rest of this entry »

BEIJING (BP)–They came hoping to sing hymns, read Scripture and worship together, but 25 members of Shouwang Church in Beijing were arrested May 22 during the seventh consecutive week that the congregation has bucked the Chinese government and refused to stop meeting.

Few other details of the latest round of arrests were available, but ChinaAid — which monitors religious freedom in China — reported that 18 of the church members had been freed by the end of the day.

In one possible sign that the confrontation is not nearing an end, the last two weeks have seen an increase in the number of church members attending the illegal service. After 13 members were arrested in the fifth week, 20 were arrested last week, and now 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Tibetan exiles said on Monday (May 23) that, according to their sources, CCP security forces detained about 300 monks from the Kirti monastery in the Aba prefecture of Sichuan province. They say the roundup was part of the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown after a Tibetan Buddhist monk lit himself on fire in protest.

Two exiled monks and a Tibetan writer say their sources told them the monks were detained and taken away in covered military trucks on April 21. Supporters had gathered around the monastery, but police beat them and drove them away with dogs.

The head of the Kirti monastery, Kirti Rinpoche lives in exile in Dharamsala, India. He said his sources told him the conditions at the monastery have become “suffocating” due to intense pressure from the CCP. Read the rest of this entry »

SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco, the maker of Internet routing gear, customized its technology to help China track members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week by members of the movement.

The lawsuit, which relies on internal sales materials, also said that Cisco had tried to market its equipment to the Chinese government by using inflammatory language that stemmed from the Maoist Cultural Revolution.

The suit was filed Thursday in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose by the Human Rights Law Foundation on behalf of members of Falun Gong. It contends that Cisco helped design the controversial “Golden Shield” firewall that is used to censor the Internet and track opponents of the Chinese government. The lawsuit names several Cisco executives, including the chairman and chief executive, John T. Chambers. Read the rest of this entry »

Mission Network News, China (MNN) ― Making waves on NPR, CNN, BBC and the New York Times, the story of one persecuted house church has struck international chords.

The Shouwang Church in Beijing has been in a battle of rights with China for years, but the struggle has only just come into focus for most. The 1,000-member church was ousted from its building when their landlord was pressured by officials to evict them. For the six weeks following, Shouwang members have been meeting publicly outside. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chinese government responded to a burgeoning civil society by jailing and persecuting people for peacefully expressing their views, holding religious beliefs not sanctioned by the state, advocating for democratic reform and human rights, and defending the rights of others. Popular social media sites remained blocked by China’s internet firewall. The authorities continued to repress Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian and other ethnic minority populations. On the international stage, China grew more confident and more aggressive in punishing countries whose leaders spoke publicly about its human rights record.

Every incarnation of totalitarianism must eventually war with Christianity. Sometimes this is simply outright persecution of any type of Christianity. More often, though, brutal regimes have manifested their hatred of Christianity by rigorously oppressing genuine and independent Christian faith and replacing it with a state-sponsored and state-controlled “Christianity.”

Writers in imperial Japan before WWII documented this totalitarian control by their own government. In his book Darkness of the Sun: The Story of Christianity in the Japanese Empire, Richard Terrill Baker described the special, virulent hatred the Japanese felt toward Christianity: Read the rest of this entry »

For a decade in China hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, undaunted by the possibility of arrest and torture, have turned their homes into bases for what Chinese authorities regard as “reactionary propaganda,” and what everyone else regards as simple truths about the right to faith and freedom from persecution.

These bases, termed “materials sites” by their operators, produce fliers, booklets, and informational CD-ROMs. The wares are then slipped surreptitiously under doorsteps or nestled in mailboxes by practitioners of Falun Gong (also know as Falun Dafa), who travel at night alone or in pairs, in cities, towns, and villages across China. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past five Sundays, more than 100 members of the Shouwang Church in Beijing have been detained to prevent them from meeting. It is a confrontation between state and conscience with broad implications for the future of China.

A member of the church, speaking to me anonymously, described the congregation as mainly “intellectuals and professionals.” What began as a Bible study group for university students has grown to 1,000 worshipers — the Chinese equivalent of a mega-church. “The Christians are very serious Christians,” she told me. “They are not political at all. They respect the government, love the country, respect authority. But they want to follow God, to engage in normal Christian practice.” And they find such practice impossible in China’s state-sponsored churches, which were initially designed to keep religion a government-controlled monopoly. Read the rest of this entry »

New York–In a decision challenging the Communist Party’s efforts to extend the persecution of Falun Gong beyond China’s borders, the Human Rights Tribunal in Ontario ruled on April 27 that a local Chinese association had discriminated against an elderly Falun Gong practitioner when revoking her membership and using demeaning labels to refer to her faith.

“I conclude that the respondents breached the [Ontario Human Rights] Code and discriminated against the complainant on the basis of her creed,” wrote tribunal vice-chair Ms. Michelle Flaherty in the decision. “The Tribunal orders the corporate respondent to pay the complainant the sum of $15,000 for loss arising from the infringement of her rights.” Read the rest of this entry »

On May 13, 1992, in a humble schoolhouse in northeastern China, Mr. Li Hongzhi began teaching Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa), introducing to modern China a practice with roots extending back thousands of years. By early 1999, there were 70 to 100 million people practicing Falun Gong in China alone, their slow-moving meditative exercises visible at dawn in parks across the country.

Nineteen years later, Falun Gong has transcended cultural and national boundaries to bring physical health, joy and peace of mind to the lives of millions around the globe. From Cape Town to Cannes, Bangledesh to Berlin, Tokyo to Tehran, Falun Gong is practiced in over 100 countries, its teachings freely available in 30 languages. Even under harsh persecution, tens of millions in China continue to practice. Read the rest of this entry »

China’s security establishment is in a ruthless mood at the moment, taking on the “tall poppies” of the law, the media, the blogosphere and the arts without apparent fear of a backlash from a public that instinctively knows the value of compliance, and the price of defiance.

However, there is another, much larger grouping, that is also heading for a collision with the “Goon State” (that’s the Economist’s) and with potentially much more serious consequences – the millions of Evangelical Christians who choose to worship outside China’s official churches.

For the last four weeks one of Beijing largest unofficial churches, the Shouwang, or WatchTower, church has been in a stand-off with police over its desire to worship free from state control, with hundreds of its members detained and its leaders put under house arrest. Read the rest of this entry »

BEIJING (BP)— For the fourth week in a row, a Chinese “illegal” church refused Sunday to follow government orders not to meet, and this time at least 31 of its members were arrested.

Once again, reporters were blocked from the site.

The arrests of the members of Beijing’s Shouwang Church in a public square came after church leaders made clear in the preceding days that they would not buckle to pressure from the Communist Party. More than 160 were arrested the first week they tried to meet outdoors, about 50 were arrested the second week and approximately 40 on the third week, Easter Sunday. The declining number of arrests likely is due to the government placing so many other members under house arrest, which prevents them from even leaving their homes. On Easter Sunday, more than 500 church members — including every church staff member, lay leader and choir member — were under house arrest. Read the rest of this entry »

New York— Since news emerged last month of three Falun Gong detainees being killed in custody at a prison in northeast China, family members of the victims and others prisoners of conscience have been harassed and beaten, as the authorities seek to cover up the deaths.

Torture and abuse intensified at Jiamusi Prison in Heilongjiang province in February after personnel received orders in early 2011 to increase the “transformation rate” among Falun Gong practitioners held at the camp. The orders were issued as part of a nationwide three-year Communist Party campaign to reinvigorate transformation efforts (CECC analysis). Read the rest of this entry »

The Global Times newspaper (hereafter, the Times) on April 26 ran a commentary with the headline “Some Churches Should Avoid Becoming Politicized” (hereafter, the text), in which it comments on the recent events in Beijing related to Shouwang Church’s outdoor worship, and just as the title says, it was a well-intentioned reminder to Shouwang. This is the only formal Chinese reporting we have seen in the domestic media of Shouwang Church’s outdoor worship. Therefore, it is necessary that we, as the party involved, provide some clarifications and explanations regarding some of the issues raised in this commentary, so that readers can have a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of this incident. Read the rest of this entry »

In Europe, Asia and the United States over the weekend, Falun Gong practitioners marked the 12th anniversary of the largest peaceful demonstration in China in 20 years. That demonstration, on April 25, 1999, was followed three months later by a violent crackdown—when the Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign to arrest and torture Falun Gong practitioners.

On Saturday, practitioners like Xu Yan in Brussels used the anniversary to call for an end to the ongoing persecution. Read the rest of this entry »